Greetings, Cranky Users! For a couple of weeks now, I've been whining about how I wanted to see the video of the DK4 panel at NN11. I certainly had an interest in the panel as a whole, but I had a specific meta-interest in kos's now-famous quote about Cranky Users, having heard many interpretations placed upon it by those who'd heard it rather than reading it.
I've recently been too busy to continue hunting obsessively for the video, but aoeu was kind enough to link me to it yesterday. I watched the planned remarks gladly, and it was nice to associate faces and voices with the people we know here as elfling and claude and vcmvo2, not to mention Meteor Blades! But the really interesting part was the Q&A portion at the end.
Oh, hell, I won't even tease you with this. It's a 50-minute video of a 75-minute session, and it ends after the third question, just as Jotter gets up to ask what he describes as two questions. Yes, it does run through the very informative answer to the question by Auntie Neo Kawn about site moderation, which we'll talk a little about below. But no, the famous quote is not included, along with Jotter's questions and the other presumably 25 minutes of the session. I think you can guess how cranky that makes me!
Here, watch it and you'll see! I'll go do some work, and meet you below the squiggle.
So, the answer to that third question, which starts around 42:00, is both interesting and encouraging. Meteor Blades assures us that, although he seemed like an omnipresent superhero at DK3, he was getting as many as 600 emails a day begging for his intervention and was therefore unable to be everywhere; he settled for making statements in some places whose meaning he hoped would be extrapolated to other situations. Moderation was and should be, he states, 1% him and 99% the community (with the site moderator(s) backing up the community). Then kos tells us that, after having Meteor Blades step back for a few months to see what would take shape, MB will be returning in a limited role along with a new technological solution, to which a development team is now dedicated. (This is a short summary -- even if you don't have 50 minutes, you can still drag the slider to 42 minutes, or 41 if you want to see Auntie Neo Kawn ask the question, and hear for yourself.) I know the Cranky Users will await the deployment of this new model eagerly, because we have (say it with me now) "just the right amount of assholeness".
Meanwhile, let's find some other diversions. What about when you have a picture to post in a comment, but you're replying in a long-ish thread and you're sort of far over to the right? The example I'm going to give you is a lengthy pootie subthread starting here -- if you scroll way down it, you'll see a comment from ursoklevar entitled "Prepare for shocker!" If you were to go directly to that comment, you'd see the whole photo just fine, but if you go back to that first link and scroll down to the same comment, the photo is too wide for the point in the thread where it finds itself. How can you figure out how wide a picture can be in that situation?
There are those who have a whole chart of width numbers in their heads, but you don't need to do that. You know, perhaps, that somewhere in whatever code your photo host gives you to paste here, there's an <img> tag with your picture's information inside it. Two things it probably has are height="xxx" and width="xxx", with numbers in place of the xxx-es. Trick #1 is, if you get rid of height="xxx" entirely, you can adjust the width and it will automatically keep the height proportional. So if my picture has, say, width="500" and height="434", and I'd like to make the width 400 instead, I don't need to calculate 500:434 as 400:x -- just delete the height and make the width whatever you like.
Trick #2 is, having done that, the width can be a percentage of the available area, whatever that is. If I want my picture to be as wide as my comment allows, however it's viewed, I can say width="100%" and the photo will grow and shrink, depending on where the reader enters the thread, and never be cut off. If you scroll down a bit below ursoklevar's comment, I respond here with a short version of this long-winded explanation and an example photo -- you can see, using these three links into that thread, how my picture changes size depending on how wide my comment is.
UPDATE: In the thread, there's some discussion about this method, starting here. Julie Waters and rs debate what sorts of mischief I am encouraging you to make, and at length it is ironed out. So that you can see what's being discussed in the context of photos in comments, I've written up the conclusions and put them in this comment with examples. Unless I'm totally wrong, of course -- that happens!
Now, let's cover one more brief topic today. I saw someone asking about this yesterday (and rserven giving a concise answer), and that tells me that more than one person would probably like to know it. Some people, myself included, have a sig line with a link in it. How do you do that?
Here are my sig, the code that appears in the Signature box in my profile that creates it, and the form of that code:
Support the Pine Ridge Billboard Project.
Support the <a href="http ://74.208.246.166:8080/web/guest/discoverprojects?projectID=305">Pine Ridge Billboard Project.</a>
<a href = "address">link words</a>
So, in that line of model code at the bottom, the word address is replaced by the url you want to link to (it needs to be inside the quotes). In place of link words, you put the label you want to appear in the link. This is exactly like what you get if you click on the Link button in a diary or comment, and fill in the url and the label, except that the Signature box has no link button. In fact, if you don't like to type html and you want to cheat, you could open a comment somewhere, use the link box to build the code you want for your sig, and then cut and paste it in your profile and abandon the comment.
That's it for today, my Cranky friends! As always, use the thread to discuss your issues and ask your questions, and answer the questions of others. Did you watch the DK4 panel? Or did you see it in person, or streaming live? What are your thoughts about it? Please remember to be kind to others here, even though you are Cranky, because we all have our own reasons for being cranky and Cranky.
WHERE TO TURN: LINKS
☀ For more stuff sort of like this, the Cranky Users group.
☀ For lots of official detail about the site and its workings, the DK4 FAQ (frequently-asked questions). The main Daily Kos FAQ is still here.
☀ To get immediate response for technical help or urgent site problems, the contact form (be sure to select the tech support radio button). Note that THE BUG REPORT FORM HAS BEEN DECOMMISSIONED. To report a bug to the dev team now, you can use the tech support form, or you can comment in an elfling diary or send her a personal message. Congratulations to the development team for reducing the bug collection to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub.
☀ For immediate catharsis, complain in a Cranky Users thread. These threads are regularly scanned by kos and developers, but it's not a guaranteed way to bring an issue to the attention of these folks. But sometimes you just need some sympathy from other cranky people! (And sometimes, other cranky people have advice that can help you.)
Our thanks to kos, the development team, and the Dkosopedia contributors for their vigorous efforts to deliver a site that works well and to help us know how to work it!
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